Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[T]he surest sign that Sen. Bernie Sanders presidential campaign is in trouble has nothing to do with his fluctuating poll numbers or front-runner Joe Biden’s steady strength in New Hampshire or Elizabeth Warren challenging Sanders to be the favorite of the Democratic Party’s left wing.
It’s that both Sanders and his top aides are now indulging in the traditional behavior of losing campaigns: whining.
As is common among those afflicted with self-pity, this whining is directed at a specific nemesis, in this case what used to be called “the press” but is now (alas) better known as “the media.”
Those media folks are not being fair to our fair Bernie, griped campaign senior adviser Jeff Weaver in a conversation with reporters on Monday.
“There seems to be a direct correlation between the media coverage of polls and Bernie Sanders’ specific standing in those polls,” Weaver said. “the better the number is in the poll, the less coverage it receives. And the worse he does, the more it receives.”
As an example, Weaver said a recent Quinnipiac University poll showing Sanders far behind Biden (32% to 14%) inspired 47 news stories, while a poll by Democracy Corps giving Biden a mere nine-point lead was the subject of only two stories.
Clearly, an anti-Sanders media cabal. What else could possibly explain such a disparity?
Well, maybe that the Quinnipiac poll was taken from Aug. 1 through Aug. 5, sampled 807 likely Democratic voters, and was the product of a highly respected polling firm with no known ideological leanings, while the Democracy Corps poll, run by proudly leftish Democrats, reached only 484 likely Democratic voters up to two weeks earlier.
So maybe paying more attention to the Quinnipiac poll reflected sound editorial judgment, not anti-Sanders bias.
Except, of course, to those convinced that somebody – “the Establishment”? the “corporate media”? the billionaires? – is out to get them, an outlook that has been evident in Bernie-world long before this week.
Weaver acknowledged as much by claiming that in 2016, Sanders was ignored by news organizations as he ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
“There was this experience — which has now been well-documented but wasn’t recognized by some at the time — called the ‘Bernie blackout,’” he said.
Was there?
In 2015, with Sanders barely a blip in the polls, Clinton got far more coverage than he did. But during the actual campaign year, calculations of media coverage by the Internet Archive presidential tracker project and by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy found that the two candidates got roughly the same amount of space and/or time from major news organizations.
“The Bernie Blackout isn’t really a thing,” concluded Ev Boyle, the associate director of the Annenberg Center.
So the “Bernie blackout” turns out to have been not so well documented after all. Neither is the “Bernie write-off” about which the campaign now complains.
Not that it has no evidence at all. Sanders pollster Ben Tulchin notes that while several media outlets ran stories about the campaign’s problems, “new independent polling analysis finds that Sanders has gained the most support of any candidate since the second round of debates and is solidly in second place among the field.”
That’s not inaccurate. The independent polling analysis to which Tulchin referred was from FiveThirtyEight, and it showed that in a weighted average of five post-debate polls Sanders gained … (drum roll here) … 1.8 percentage points.
Better than anyone else, but a thin reed on which to base an accusation of bias because political reporters were not impressed. It’s not all that impressive.
To hear Sanders and his supporters tell it, the “corporate media” is hostile to his campaign. But the corporate media are not a monolith. If they have a common goal, it is to make money. Some of the corporate leaders want to influence policy and politics, but most of them don’t know how to do that, and know that they don’t know how to do that. So they don’t try.
Most of those who do try – Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group – are on the far right side of the ideological spectrum. But Sanders gets most upset at the decidedly mainstream and (sort of) liberal Washington Post.
The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns Amazon, which Sanders has justifiably assailed for being a stingy employer and for paying little – or maybe even nothing – in federal income taxes.
“I talk about [Amazon’s taxes] all of the time,” Sanders said last week. “And then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why.”
Touchy, touchy. One of the Post articles the Sanders campaign didn’t like – “Is Iowa No Longer Feelin’ the Bern?” – ran last week. It was an incisive, fair example of good political journalism. The Sanders campaign is also unhappy that the Post broke the stories about campaign staffers complaining about their pay and working conditions.
The Post ran those stories because they were newsworthy.
Besides, Jeff Bezos is no fool, so presumably knows that any Democratic president would seek a more progressive tax code, one which could threaten whatever loopholes Amazon is using. He is probably smart enough to know that trying to derail Sanders now would do him no good, and he is certainly smart enough to know that if he tried to interfere in the Post’s political coverage the many first-class journalists at the paper would be telling their friends about it.
They are not. He is not.
The question now is whether Bernie Sanders, Jeff Weaver and their associates are smart enough to know that their own political interests would be best served if they stop whining.
